BY HANK REICHMAN A year ago I began a post to this blog, “Yesterday’s election results in Virginia, Ohio, Kentucky and elsewhere have boosted the spirits of Democrats and progressives. One of the less widely publicized results, however, has been the stunning rebuke suffered by book-banners and transphobes like Moms for Liberty in school board…
BY HANK REICHMAN James Vernon, the Helen Fawcett Distinguished Professor of History at the University of California at Berkeley and former co-chair of the Berkeley Faculty Association, is also leading Berkeley’s recently launched Global Democracy Commons project. I was honored that James invited me to interview for the first installment of the program’s new monthly…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN On October 26, the Executive Committee of the University of Pennsylvania AAUP chapter issued the following public statement regarding the recent police raid on Penn undergraduate students: We are alarmed by the Penn administration’s escalating use of police action against Penn students. So too are we alarmed by the University’s pattern—established…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN The following public response was addressed to the administration and regents of the University of Washington. We write as Jewish faculty, staff, alumni, and students of the University of Washington to voice our concerns with the Antisemitism Task Force’s Report, titled “Climate Assessment and Reports from the Antisemitism and Islamophobia Task…
POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN As I have previously posted on this blog, Russian sociologist and professor Boris Kagarlitsky is serving a 5-year sentence in a Russian penal colony on the fabricated charge of “justifying terrorism.” Kagarlitsky, whose dissident activity dates back to an earlier imprisonment under the Soviet regime of Leonid Brezhnev, has become a…
BY HANK REICHMAN Yesterday, September 19, the Council of University of California Faculty Associations (CUCFA) filed an unfair labor practice (ULP) complaint charging the university with violations of legally protected faculty employee expression surrounding the war in Gaza. I posted a summary of the complaint to this blog yesterday. To access the full 581-page (including…
BY HANK REICHMAN Today, as the UC Regents were completing their meeting at the UCLA campus, the Council of University of California Faculty Associations (CUCFA), a partner of the AAUP, and the faculty associations at UC Berkeley, Davis, Irvine, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Santa Cruz filed an amended unfair labor practice (ULP) complaint against…
BY HANK REICHMAN When the AAUP’s special committee on political interference and academic freedom in Florida’s public higher education system, which I cochaired, issued its report last December, there was little mention of former Nebraska Republican senator Ben Sasse’s appointment as president of the University of Florida. After all, Governor Ron DeSantis’s unprecedented takeover of…
BY HANK REICHMAN Sociologist, antiwar activist, and internationally renowned Marxist thinker Boris Kagarlitsky, a professor at the Moscow Higher School of Economics and head of the Moscow think tank The Institute for Globalization Studies and Social Movements, who was convicted of “justifying terrorism” for remarks he made about Russia’s war against Ukraine and sentenced to…
BY HANK REICHMAN The following is the text of my May 15, 2024, keynote address to the international symposium, “Academic Freedom in the Twenty-First Century,” sponsored by the Wenner-Gren Foundations and the Academia Europaea HERCuLES in Stockholm, Sweden. A slightly expanded version will be published next year, along with other symposium presentations, in European Review. …